G20 countries including Japan, USA, EU, and Republic of Korea, etc. have invested and made lots of efforts in order to improve an educational environment for visually impaired people in government, private industry, research laboratories, etc., and have been continuously made a greater efforts to improve the educational environment for visually impaired people by developing various types of educational assistive engineering devices for visually impaired people.
Conventional educational assistive engineering devices for the visually impaired people were the level which is simply enlarged character information and provided to people with low vision by using a large monitor, a screen enlargement program, a voice recorder capable of making a memo related to voice, voice output software, a braille information terminal, a braille printer, a document cognition terminal, and an enlargement reader.
Recently, educational assistive technology apparatuses have been improved to the level of converting character information into braille or voice and providing blind people with the converted braille or voice by using technologies such as an OCR (Optical Character Reader), a TTS (Text to Speech) system, a braille translator (translating a text to braille), and a reverse braille translator such as a braille information terminal, voice output software and a document cognition program and the like.
According to a survey on the employment status of visually impaired people, among those who desire vocational training, 12.2% (57,546 out of total 472,514, in 2005 year) are engaged in massage, acupuncture, clergy, fortune telling, and teacher. This situation shows that a tendency for visually impaired people to enter the workforce is very limited up to now. The current status implies that the special educational environment is not suitable for the visually impaired people who desire to work for various fields. Accordingly, more specialized educational assistive engineering devices for improving a learning efficiency of the visually impaired people are required.
There is no educational assistive engineering device for simultaneously transmitting educational data such as visual character or video information in real time in a current special education environment for visually impaired people since educational equipment such as a blackboard used in a general education environment is also used in the special education environment. Therefore, visually impaired people need to receive learning information in a form of haptic information and voice information in the special education environment of visually impaired people.
However, the haptic information and the voice information are factors which heavily restrict an amount of information which may be conveyed for a limited education time. Although visually impaired people may be able to easily understand the information when video information is converted to haptic information and then the converted haptic information is provided to the visually impaired people, there is currently no assistive engineering device for automatically converting the video information into the haptic information in real time.
Specifically, people with low vision and blind people receive an education together in the current special education environment for visually impaired people based on characters or voice, and there is no method of converting suitable educational data and video data in real time according to the degrees of visual impairments and then transmitting the converted data.
For example, people with low vision may acquire educational information by using a screen enlargement program. Blind people may acquire educational information by using braille or the sense of touch. However, in the current special education environment in which people with low vision and blind people study together, there is a limitation in suitably converting and providing the educational information according to an information cognition characteristic for each visual impairment rating and then providing the converted information within a limited education time.
The current special education environment based on only characters and voice makes visually impaired people feel many difficulties in acquiring necessary knowledge. As a result, visually impaired people have been appeared a phenomenon which avoid entering a school requiring a high level of knowledge.
When visually impaired people acquire educational data by using haptic information converted from video information, the visually impaired people may easily understand the information, but the amount of haptic information converted from video information is extremely limited in the current special education environment of visually impaired people. However a braille printer and educational equipment for converting the video information into the haptic information exist, there is a practical limitation in terms of time and costs because the video information should be manually converted to the haptic information and manufactured by a special education instructor or an assistant.
According to the current status, an educational assistive engineering device for converting the learning data in a form of a character, a picture, a figure, and an image into the haptic information in real time and then simultaneously transmitting the converted haptic information to the visually impaired people is strongly required in order to provide a special learning environment for the visually impaired people as similar as possible to the general learning environment.